The Somebodies Read online

  The Somebodies

  by N. E. Bode

  Illustrated by Peter Ferguson

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

  to your soul—a stunning soul that is

  not in the least bit ordinary

  Contents

  A Letter from N. E. Bode

  Part 1

  The Golden Singing Invitation

  1 The City Beneath the City

  2 Mrs. Fluggery’s Rules and Regulations

  3 The Coatroom

  4 The Invitation Discovered

  5 Whispers…and Answers?

  6 Emergency Meeting

  Part 2

  The City Beneath the City

  1 Charlie Horse

  2 Elevators Aplenty

  3 The Bed Beneath the Bed

  4 Dead Books

  5 Pony on the Loose

  Part 3

  The Ivory Key

  1 Oh, Conventions!

  2 Willy Fattler’s Grand Lobby—Flying Monkeys and All!

  3 A Transformation

  4 Hyun’s Dollar Fiesta

  5 The Brain as Altar

  6 The Ivory Key

  Part 4

  The Brain

  1 This Way to the Brain

  2 The Brainkeeper

  3 Chaos Below!

  4 Flying Monkeys Turned Evil

  Part 5

  The Secret Society of Somebodies

  1 The Gazebo

  2 More Souls

  3 The Battle Foretold

  4 The Castle

  5 The Hole Left Behind

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Books by N. E. Bode

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A LETTER FROM N. E. BODE

  Oh, smart and witty reader, so brave and true-hearted—

  I think of you more often than you think of me.

  I do.

  I wonder if you’ve had a good day. Have you found a dollar in an empty bus seat, gotten six chicken nuggets in your five-pack, been told you arm-wrestle so well you could become famous for it? Or are you having a bad day—suffered a noogie, swallowed gum, eaten a bad taco?

  I’ve known bad days. You see, my insanely jealous creative writing professor, whose name I will not disclose, has recently won a Guggenpulitzheimer, the famous, coveted literary prize. Maybe you’ve heard him speak on the radio—long, windy speeches on his own rare talent and the benefits of having been born with a full set of pearly baby teeth, et cetera. I thought this bit of fame might lighten him up a little. But, alas, no. By the time I’d finished writing The Anybodies and was working on The Nobodies—both of which describe the all-true adventures of Fern and Howard—I was still dodging his vicious bunny attacks and his purposefully misguided wrecking balls. And I had resorted to living a haunted life in various disguises: rodeo clown, brain surgeon, fishmonger—you get the idea. My rare joy was when I called my editor on a pay phone and asked that she read me my fan mail. (Hello, Jack Reilly from Elsmere! Hello, Ursula the Brave and Leah of the breathless sentences! Hello, bitter nitpicker who fussed at me for ending my sentences with prepositions—thanks for noticing!) These joys were fleeting.

  Shortly after I finished writing the stories of Fern and Howard, who are as smart and witty and brave and true-hearted as you, I became a shaking mess. I’d been hiding out and I’d been very sickly. I had no idea why I’d been so weak and exhausted and pale—a mere ghost of my true self. I thought perhaps the constant fear of my creative writing professor was getting to me. But, as Fern would later explain, I was caught up in something else, something much bigger and more sinister, something that had to do with Anybodies, as well as the Somebodies and the dastardly Blue Queen!

  But I’m getting ahead of myself here. I only learned all this after Fern got word to me through a company called Super Jack’s Singing Carrier Pigeon Telegram Message Service. The pigeon had a note attached to his little leg and tweeted, singishly, while I read.

  In the note Fern explained that she and Howard had gone through a new adventure, and my sickness was a part of it all. Of course, I really wanted to write all about this adventure too, but I didn’t know how I’d be able to, what with my insanely jealous creative writing professor trying to off me at every sharp turn. I needed a safe haven. Happily, Fern and Howard knew the best hiding place in the world. I cannot tell you where—not yet. No, no, no. You’ve got to be patient for that.

  But now, for those who don’t know who Fern and Howard are, or what an Anybody is, you don’t really have to run back to the first two books, The Anybodies and The Nobodies. (You can if you want to. Of course I’m not going to stop you!) Here is a short glossary of terms:

  1. AN ANYBODY—a person who by nature or training (concentration and sometimes hypnosis) can transform objects into reality (for example, Fern once reached into a painting of a fishpond and petted the fish) and who can transform themselves and others (a nun into a lamppost, a bad guy into a bull). Anybodies are shape changers in a way, as you’ll see, who are so in tune with the world’s constant state of change—the world is always changing, you know, and nothing stays the same—that Anybodies can change right along with it.

  2. FERN—A girl who found out, not too long ago, that she was swapped at birth, and she isn’t the daughter of a pair of tragically dull accountants, the Drudgers, as she’d always thought. She’s actually an Anybody, and a royal Anybody, in fact. At the end of Fern’s exhausting but heroic summer camp adventure, her precious book, The Art of Being Anybody, had given Fern the crown and scepter, and the person who owns the crown and scepter is the royal ruler.

  3. HOWARD—the boy who was mistakenly swapped at birth with Fern. Howard is the true son of the Drudgers—despite which, Fern and Howard are great friends, almost brother and sister.

  4. THE BONE—Fern’s father. He was a washed-up Anybody who never was naturally gifted, and he now lives with Fern and Fern’s grandmother in her grandmother’s boardinghouse.

  5. ELIZA—Fern’s mother. She was a great Anybody. She died while giving birth to Fern, but Fern still feels her mother’s presence strongly and often smells the scent of lilacs—Eliza’s favorite flower—pouring out of her mother’s old diary.

  6. THE GREAT REALDO—the greatest of all Anybodies, the Great Realdo is a force for good, and the current Great Realdo is, in fact, Fern’s grandmother, Dorathea Gretel. Have some fun and shove around the letters in “the Great Realdo” and you might come up with “Dorathea Gretel.”

  7. THE ART OF BEING ANYBODY BY OGLETHORP HENCEFORTHTOWITH—a one-of-a-kind book that holds all the secrets of being an Anybody and that can only be read by the person who the book belongs to. The book belongs to Fern, but she has had to keep it out of the hands of two bad guys back-to-back: the Miser and BORT.

  8. FERN’S GRANDMOTHER’S BOARDINGHOUSE—a house that exists in a world of books. It’s even constructed with books as the main building supply! The house is populated with creatures that have been shaken from books—Borrowers in the walls, hobbits in the yard, Indians in the cupboards. It’s situated where the sidewalk ends, beside a peach tree with the most enormous, one might say, giant peach.

  9. THE SOMEBODIES—well, I can’t tell you who the Somebodies are, can I? That would ruin this book!

  Okay, okay, enough dillydallying and lollygagging, not to mention dillylolling and dallygagging. Turn the page!

  From my hidden perch,

  PART 1

  THE GOLDEN SINGING INVITATION

  1

  THE CITY BENEATH THE CITY

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THE ANNUAL ANYBODIES Convention, Fern sat on the book-lined stairs of her grandmother’s boardinghouse. She was eavesdropping on the heated argument in the kitchen. It was after dinner
and stew smells hung in the air—all beefy and porky and, well, stewy. Fern couldn’t make out every word of the argument. The boardinghouse was like a big ear stuffed with cotton—so crammed with books that sounds were muffled. (In fact, the staircase was like an upward tunnel through a mound of books that someone had dug their way out of.) Making the eavesdropping harder, the hobbits who lived in homes of grassy mounds out in the yard were singing what sounded like sea shanties, and the Indian, who usually lived in the cupboard, was playing a drum of some sort. Fern could only hear the argument when Dorathea and the Bone raised their voices.

  “Fern needs to be among [muffle, muffle] Anybodies,” the Bone said. “We must face the fact that she’s royal now!” the Bone shouted.

  This was true. Fern balled up her fist and shook it. “I’m royal now,” she whispered urgently. “You tell her!”

  Dorathea didn’t like the fact that Fern was royal. It’s too soon, her grandmother had told her. You aren’t ready. But the Bone was proud and loved the idea of being royal-by-association. He’d grown up quite poor and lonesome, you see—the son of a fat lady in a circus. “What will it hurt her to miss a few days of long division?” the Bone said.

  “Yes, yes!” Fern said. “What good is long division?”

  Fern could hear dishes rattling in the sink. “She needs to know [clank, clank]…live in the real world,” Dorathea was saying. “Royalty [muffle, muffle]…it won’t do her any good at this point. It will just [loud chorus of sea shanty and drumming]…and spoil her.”

  But what if Fern wanted to be spoiled? She kind of did, and who could blame her, really? I want to be spoiled—velvet pillows, and miniature claw-footed bathtubs just for my feet, and chocolates in the shapes of squirrels or porcupines, life-sized, or whatever it is that the rich have nowadays. “Don’t underestimate the importance of long division, and a real childhood,” Dorathea said.

  The argument was about whether or not Dorathea should take Fern to the Annual Anybodies Convention, which was always held at Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel, located near New York City.

  Let me be more accurate: Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel isn’t near New York City as much as it is under New York City, which is how it got the “Underground” part of its name.

  Everyone knows that New York has a lot going on underground. Its subway cars with their shiny poles are filled with all kinds of people and their hats, shopping bags, umbrellas, schnauzers, and portable massage tables, all jiggering down dark tunnels into their unknowable futures. In fact, as this story starts, I was one of those New Yorkers—in disguise so that I could dodge my insanely jealous creative writing professor’s murderous plots, of course! Imagine me holding on to the shiny subway pole, dressed as a confused bishop in a tall white pointed hat, or an elderly woman feeding Yum-Yums to her pet Chihuahua, its bony head poking out of her black pocketbook, or a sushi chef (which is very hard to say three times fast). I had no idea that, just below, there was a city beneath the city, an Anybody city, a shorter, more bulbously rotund version of New York City. This city beneath the city was warped, because it had to grow around steam pipes, aqueducts, and abandoned chutes of all sorts, the buildings twisting the way roots grow around water pipes. Its sky was dirt-packed and veined with the undersides of subway tunnels.

  Fern had read all about the city beneath the city in The Art of Being Anybody—Chapter 16, “Anybody Locales,” which featured a large, leathery foldout map. It wasn’t just a crisscross of street names—6th and Apple, 32nd and Small Change—like a normal map. No, no. It included the names of the shops and buildings: Hoist’s Deli, Melvin’s Laundromat and Dry Cleaner’s, Hyun’s Dollar Fiesta. There were a few squat churches and synagogues, a portly mosque, a row of narrow courthouses, and a castle with a gate and a short pointy spire, which poked right into the dirty underside of Manhattan like a tack on a rumpy teacher’s chair.

  Fern was desperate to go to the city beneath the city, mainly because it was chock-full of Anybodies—a whole city of people like her, with her powers. She wanted to see exactly what such a place would be like, especially now that she spent most of her time clamped into a desk, surrounded by kids who didn’t know that Anybodies existed, and taught by the brooding, whirling, yammering Mrs. Fluggery (who’d already accused Fern of having a head stuffed with doilies).

  Doilies? Yes, doilies. Mrs. Fluggery was odd. She often didn’t make any sense at all. She stuffed dirty tissues up her sleeves and had hair in the airy shape of the Washington Monument.

  All day long Fern had to forget that she was an Anybody. She hated the rows of desks all shoved together, the kids all poking at one another and being mean, not to mention the gummy underside of everything. The kids were all smiley and do-right in front of the teacher, but then turned on you, ready to pinch or knuckle-punch—especially Lucess Brine (pronounced LOO-sess) or Lulu, as she liked to be called, even though it was a nickname that didn’t fit her and no one ever called her that. Lucess was also a new student that year. She was a strange kid. Fern had never met anyone like her before. She was a bully, but apologetic about it. She sat behind Fern and would pinch her in the back and tattle on Fern for the littlest things, like pulling the eraser out of her pencil or putting the wrong date on her paper. Then sometimes Fern would find a note from Lucess in her pocket later, saying something like:

  Fern,

  I’m sorry I did that. I can’t help it. I’m no good. (Do you feel sorry for me now?)

  And don’t tell anyone I apologized to you or I’ll pinch you harder next time! Don’t you wish you were a somebody, like me, not a big-eyed freaky nobody, like yourself? (Did that make you feel bad?)

  Lucess

  The notes were always pretty much the same. Sometimes Lucess called Fern a “big-haired freaky nobody,” but that was a rare deviation. It seemed like every time Fern turned around, Lucess Brine’s perky nose was aimed right at her, and Lucess was bragging about something—her glitter lip gloss, her house with its multiple refrigerators, or her mother’s rubber fruit collection. “It’s so real that our tax man nearly choked to death on a blue grape!” Most of her bragging had to do with Lucess’s mother, who, she claimed, was tall, elegant, beautiful, rich. She seemed to like to bring up her mother, and then turn to Fern, saying, “Awww, sorry, I forgot. You don’t have one. Isn’t that a sore spot with you?”

  And all of Lucess’s friends would laugh. Lucess seemed to have tons of friends even though she wasn’t particularly nice to them either—at least not in public. Lucess was one of those nasty kids who other kids are attracted to, out of awe or fear.

  Lucess made Fern want to brag in other ways. Fern had a lot to brag about. She was a gifted Anybody who’d once turned herself into a grizzly bear! Could Lucess Brine’s rich mother with her rubber fruit collection compete with that? But Fern wasn’t allowed to say anything like this. She just had to nod and say, “Congratulations on almost choking the tax man.”

  Fern had to try to be somewhat ordinary again, and Fern wasn’t very good at being ordinary. She’d tried it, and it always made her feel clamped down, like a bunny in a shoe box. This was frustrating, because she wanted to be a great Anybody. She was royalty, after all. And great Anybodies tended to be their own people. They didn’t fit in. They seemed to get down to what was essential them—their unique core—and build themselves up from there. What if her grandmother had walked around just trying to be ordinary? Would she have become the Great Realdo? What if the hermit, Phoebe, had just tried to fit in? Would she ever have learned how to travel through a teapot to London, where she and Holmquist were now on their honeymoon? Take the great Willy Fattler, genius of Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel. What if he’d tried to be average? Would he ever have designed the wildest ever-changing Anybody hotel of all time? The answers to these questions were: no, no, and no.

  Howard, on the other hand, had been the one to love being ordinary. He was wonderful at it. After the harrowing adventures of camp, he’d requested to spend the rest of t
he summer with the Drudgers, his biological parents, so that he could get a bellyful of ordinary. He promised not to do any Anybody trickery (he’d once accidentally turned them into monkeys while showing off for a friend), and this time he’d stayed true to his word. He just enjoyed his math books and the bland food and the beige walls and the beige carpeting, and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Drudger. He adored listening to them discuss all their favorite things: sod, coupons, desk organizers, the steam function on their new iron, and tax code. They were both accountants working for Beige & Beige. Howard wanted to be an accountant too.

  By summer’s end the Drudgers and Dorathea and the Bone had decided that it was important that Howard and Fern continue to have a good brotherly, sisterly relationship. They weren’t brother and sister, but each was an only child, and so it was important, they all agreed, for the two kids to stick together. To keep up the good relationship they’d developed while at camp together, it was best to have them in the same school. Howard sat two rows to Fern’s left, in fact, in Mrs. Fluggery’s classroom.

  But this didn’t help much. Just by sitting there in his dullish Howard way—something Fern had grown oddly fond of—Howard reminded Fern of all of the adventures they’d had together: the rhino that had stampeded out of a book, the attack of the vicious mole, the boat ride down the Avenue of the Americas while it was flooded.